


Dust to Dust;

by spiritikran



Category: Daredevil (TV)
Genre: Other
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-24
Updated: 2018-10-24
Packaged: 2019-08-06 22:02:41
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,446
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16395914
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/spiritikran/pseuds/spiritikran
Summary: A character study of the where the trio was at the beginning of the season.





	Dust to Dust;

**Author's Note:**

> This happened because I was frustrated Elektra didn’t even get a cameo as a hallucination. And then it expanded into whatever this is. So enjoy I guess?

Love is but dust;

and out of dust  
crumbling ruins are rebuilt into empires.

This empire was ours, Matt had thought in what he had been sure were his final moments; It wasn’t supposed to collapse so easily.

Collapse. His mind lingers on that word. A word meant for human chests, he thinks. For the way a ribcage can cave in with enough force. Violence, he understands that. He has the devil inside him, after all. 

Still, it hadn’t been too late for Matt. Instead of holding her, in between the relentless tremors before the building fell he could have repented, he could have been forgiven. But what was forgiveness from God compared to how tenderly he clung to her?

So maybe there would be no golden afterlife for them. But it was enough to know that whatever after waited for them, they would face it together. 

Or they were supposed to.

Then he awoke. And the dust was still in his lungs and her heartbeat was still in his ears and her name was still scrawled in his mind, Elektra, Elektra, Elektra.

Elektra, whose fingers had danced over his scars.  
Elektra, who had taught him to love his darkness.  
Elektra, who had arisen out of dust time and time again, and who was supposed to rise out of this, too.

Elektra, who was not with him as his fingertips mourned the absence of her touch against them. As he reached for her, half senseless, and grasped only empty air.

Where did you go, Elektra? He’d asked her not long ago. She’d been alive to answer him then. But when he asked the question now-

“I’m right here, Matthew,” he swore he heard her answer, illogical as it was. She was the first of the imagined voices he would hear in his head over the next few days, the first of many ghosts come back to haunt him. First it would be her, then Fisk, then his father, than alternations of all three of them.

“I never left you,” her voice echoed impossibly , “not the first time, all those years ago. I always carried you in my heart. But I dreaded coming back because I knew we were doomed. You- with your refusal to kill, your stubborn faith in God- doomed us. And here we are, now. I came back from the dead for you and you still couldn’t save me. Except this time, God played a cruel trick on you. He let you think we would be together when we died. But instead, you lived. And do you want to know why?”

He heard her voice closer, this time, right next to his ear as if she was leaning over him. As if she was really beside him.

“It’s a punishment from your God, Matthew. For forgetting His most basic lesson. To love, to let people close, is a foolish distraction. Ashes to ashes, it always ends the same way. Dust.”

—-

Love is but dust;

and out of dust emerges shadows.

After all she’d been through Karen Page should have learned long ago to stop jumping at shadows.

And physically, she had. Her body no longer visibly jolted and her muscles no longer tensed at any unfamiliar movement. But her mind always raced, her heart always sped up audibly, though only Matt’s hypersensitive ears could have detected it. 

Until Matt, every shadow she’d ever met had greeted her unkindly. Then he had come. Swooping out of an alley. Clench-jawed, masked, beautiful and terrifying all at once. They called him the Devil, but if she’d still been Catholic she would have thought him an angel. 

She believed he had cured her of her fear.

But Frank Castle came next, and he’d given fear a new meaning. At first he’d been a hostile shadow, firing guns in a safe haven. He’d been the smell of terror in a sanitized hospital. He’d been the color red in bleached white hallways. He’d been a shadow, lurking where a shadow was not supposed to be.

Everything about him- the husky edge to his voice, the cuts that branded his skin, the way he seemed to vibrate with fatal intentions- was dangerous. But Karen, ever faithful journalist that she was, had seen something more than a threat when she looked at him. She saw An unwritten news story. A horrible tragedy. A lesson to the public about the cost of wars, about the descent of good men into darkness.

Somewhere, between the conversations they’d exchanged, between sorrow and stillness, she’d gone from fearing him to fearing for him, and that was a new feeling. A kind of fear she had not prepared herself for. 

Sure, in the back of her mind she had felt something resembling that fear before. So many times when she secretly worried if that man in Black who had saved her, who she hadn’t known at the time was Matt, would get caught in one too many crossfires. She worried subconsciously what would happen if the Devil of Hell’s kitchen were to disappear, worried about the state of a world he wasn’t in. 

But that had been the vague, detached worry of one watching news from afar. This- this was the hopeless dread of attaching worry to a specific person, to a man she owed her life to. 

She did what she could to help him. But despite every effort she made to keep him in the light he returned, over and over again, to the shadows, and she would not follow him there, as much as she wanted to.

She had too many of her own shadows to face. 

—-

Love is but dust, 

and Foggy had grown tired of constantly clearing so much of it away. The dorm where he’d lived with Matt in college had collected more dust that he’d thought possible. Matt couldn’t have known this, of course, so foggy didn’t exactly hold it against him, especially given the fact that he was contributing so much of the dust himself. 

But that didn’t mean it didn’t get exhausting. Clearing dust away just for it to accumulate again, to pile up even more than it had before. 

When Matt lived on his own Foggy had expected that he would at least make some effort to get rid of the dust, even if he couldn’t see it, for the sake of those who visited if not for himself so he could breath the air in his home without inhaling it. But he didn’t. Matt did the bare minimum maintenance of his apartment and Foggy would only realize later it was because he hardly spent time there. At the time it had seemed that Matt was just careless, that he had no regard for his own well being, which wasn’t that far from the truth. 

But even if Matt didn’t care, someone had to. And since he was the only one Matt had maintained constant contact with, that burden fell to Foggy.

It had grown to be an unconscious impulse. He’d take something thick with dust and blow on it, or quickly brush off the surface with his hand. He hated that he’d gotten used to it. Damnit, Matt, he’d think when he caught himself. 

He had done it for so long that it was too late to stop. Each time it frustrated him more and more to think that he’d stuck around all those years this is what he got in return: a crush on his best friend that would never be reciprocated and the stubborn inclination to clean every dusty surface he came across.

It took Matt dying for his feelings to go away, or at least enough for him to let them go enough to move on with his life. For him to feel worthy of more than Matt’s clutter. For him to finally build a serious relationship with Marci, the person who it turned out had his back all along. The person he should have been spending time with while he was worrying about Matt, mourning Matt, cleaning up Matt’s messes.

And when- if- Matt came back, Foggy knew one thing for sure. The dust he left behind was no longer Foggy’s to clean.

——

Love is but dust, and it floats up into the air in a trail thin as a whisper; unnoticeable, but unfading. It cannot be killed because it is left behind in death. Once it has chosen a place to settle it cannot be erased; once it is inside a heart, it is there forever. It is inescapable, because it is what makes us. To reject it is to let it destroy us; to embrace it is to embrace ourselves.

——


End file.
